


Who even said love makes you happy?

by TailorNorata



Series: Tumblr Short Stories [10]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Feels, Guilt, Happy Ending, M/M, Tattoos, canon character death, your soulmates name appears when they fall in love with you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-27 02:37:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14415831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TailorNorata/pseuds/TailorNorata
Summary: His legs actually gave in.'Peter' stood there, in a beautiful handwriting, not in any way modest but big and possessively stretching from one side of his lower back to the other.Great, he would not be able to show anybody ever his back again with this.





	Who even said love makes you happy?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GracieBirdie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GracieBirdie/gifts).



When Stiles had hit puberty he had wanted mainly one thing, to find his soulmate.

He couldn’t really tell back then why he felt that strong a need for it - he had thought it might be because his soulmate was close by and he just needed to find them and fall in love and have them fall in love with him as well.

When he met Lydia he was convinced it had to be her.

She was beautiful, he was so smitten and they could banter so great - the few times she decided to let her true intelligence show.

He was sure his name already had to have shown up on her skin, but she never made the slightest of hints it might so he wasn’t certain. Maybe he was just crushing but not really in love with her? Maybe his name had shown up but she didn’t like the idea and he’d have to convince her he was worthy? Maybe she didn’t know it was him? No, if his name had been on her skin she’d have been smart enough to find out it was him. He had no doubt.

When he went to the public pool with Scott one summer though he saw Lydia there, in a pretty revealing bikini and no name in sight. This gave him a lot of questions.

~*~

Two years later Scott was bitten by a werewolf in the woods, and a little bit later than that Stiles was confronted with a man, a dangerous, impressive man that gave him the most conflicting feelings.

Peter Hale.

His heart was beating like crazy when Peter was holding his wrist, when his mouth got so close to the hem of his sleeve and the skin underneath it.

Then there was a quick, burning sensation at the small of his back.

It made him snap out of it and pull his arm away.

“I don’t wanna be like you.”

He didn’t, but he wanted...something.

And the man called him out on it but Stiles stayed put.

The pain in his back was gone and with a final “Goodbye Stiles” so was Peter.

Stiles didn’t even find the time or wit to respond anything anymore.

 

When he came home and checked on his back in the mirror his organs felt like they were randomly swapped in his body and not liking it at all. His legs actually gave in.

'Peter' stood there, in a beautiful handwriting, not in any way modest but big and possessively stretching from one side of his lower back to the other.

Great, he would not be able to show anybody ever his back again with this.

Scott would lose his mind if he found out the guy they were trying to get rid of was his soulmate.

His father would not understand either, he’d try not to be an asshole about it, but he wouldn’t understand.

Why though had Peter’s name even shown up? Surely the little they had spoken wasn’t enough for Peter to have fallen for him...Stiles knew he was neither that pretty nor charming.

Maybe this was a mistake? Maybe a curse? Another Peter perhaps?

No, it was this Peter, it hadn’t been coincidence the name had appeared when they had been in the garage together.

The lower back of all places...obviously the hands or face would have been more difficult, but at least smaller…

~*~

From there things escalated.

The climax of the entire disaster was when Stiles was holding a molotov cocktail and threw it at the creature that was Peter - his soulmate - with almost no hesitation.

He was afraid and then relieved when the glass didn’t break, but everything was already set in motion and he might not have lit the fire but he might as well have.

Watching Peter burn again hurt even more than he had feared and the grave reality of all of it started to set in.

When Peter fell, dead, his flesh burned so much he was almost beyond recognizable Stiles felt a part of him die too. That part was the naive wish he had had to find his soulmate.

He had been convinced it’d be something to be happy about, something that’d make his life whole again.

In losing that dream he realized what it had represented for him.

Finding his soulmate - so he had thought - would mean overcoming the loss of his mother and to an extent his father. Because while his dad was still alive Stiles had often felt like he had lost him as well. His father was better now, but the first years after Stiles’ mother had died his father had given himself over to work and alcohol.

Stiles desire to find his soulmate had been his desire to find someone who would not leave or reject him.

And Peter actually hadn’t. He had embraced the idea of Stiles belonging to him, his pack…

In the end maybe people weren’t leaving and rejecting him, maybe Stiles himself was responsible for not having anybody who actually loved him. After all, he had basically killed the one person that might have been able to.

So his dream died, and his faith in love with it.

~*~

The decision to get a tattoo had taken a while, mainly because Stiles was not a fan of needles.

But he felt handicapped, always paranoid about somebody seeing the name of his soulmate. 

There were other Peters in their lives, but none he was remotely close to, he would have to answer questions and Derek probably knew his uncle’s handwriting and the risk was just heightening his anxiety to a troublesome level.

So there he was lying on the tattooist’s table, using a breathing technique that usually calmed him down.

The buzzing of the needle changed a bit in tone when it dug into his skin and the pain wasn’t great, but it actually wasn’t as bad a feeling as he had worried.

As long as he didn’t have to watch the needle stab him repeatedly he might actually be fine.

In the end he had a huge black wolf covering his lower back, accompanied by a few pine trees.

He had thought about it for quite a while and decided it was fitting. And considering his best friend was a werewolf now, and there started to be a small pack of them he felt it was easily explained why he had chosen the motiv.

No one needed to know it was in memoriam of the former Hale Alpha.

It wasn’t like he could openly bemoan his death.

And it also wasn’t like he actually had a right to.

He hadn’t known Peter.

The love Peter had felt for him could only have been superficial at best, delusional at worst.

He wasn’t really mourning for the man Peter Hale, he was mourning for the lost possibilities.

The eyes of the werewolf were white spots in it’s dark face.

He had thought about having them done in red, but that might raise questions again. He had thought about making them blue, for the death he felt guilty for, but that might have raised questions as well. He hadn’t felt like yellow was an option though. So they were ghostly blank specks, letting the wolf look a bit eerie - he actually quite liked it.

“Why do you want to cover it up?” the tattoo artist had asked.

“You don’t like who it is?”

Stiles had taken a deep breath.

“He’s dead.”

“Shit man...how old are you? You can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen...that’s rough.”

He sighed, resigned, trying not to let it get to him.

“Yeah…”

A small consultation had been the discount the guy had given him on the work.

Stiles would probably have turned it down if he hadn’t already felt bad about using their money on getting a tattoo in the first place.

 

Scott actually thought the tattoo looked cool and decided to get one himself. Turns out you need fire to get a tattoo to stick on werewolf skin.

In that moment Stiles hadn’t been as sad as usually that he didn’t take the bite.

 

He continued life, continued the social interactions as before - he even still implied now and then Lydia might be his soulmate, though he did tone it down a lot since it was just for show.

She was the only one to realize actually. And he was the first to realize something was strange about her.

They didn’t figure it out before Peter was resurrected though.

~*~

Peter came back and Stiles had difficulties grasping that for a few days.

He was more aware than ever of the letters on his back, hidden underneath the fur of a big, black wolf. But he had no idea what to do about it. He didn’t even know if they still were soulmates. Resurrection wasn’t covered in soul and sex ed classes…

Maybe Peter belonged to somebody else now…

~*~

When Peter first really came face to face with Stiles his tortured wolf was in turmoil and he had difficulties controlling it, especially with the alpha powers amping up it’s strength even more.

The closer he got the more wholesome and familiar Stiles’ scent seemed to be - like a home he had never known he had. Almost like pack and somehow a lot more.

It was when his nose was almost touching Stiles’ skin when holding his arm that let everything click into place.

Stiles was his soulmate.

Peter knew very little about this boy, but he wasn’t a man at the moment, he was little more than a feral wolf with a human suit. And his wolf loved Stiles unconditionally.

He sense the boy was his soulmate and that was all it took.

Which made it so much more painful when it was Stiles who threw the molotov cocktail and doomed his fate.

~*~

He felt more sane now. The powers were gone, the manic need to take revenge. Left was the pain, the healthy need to take revenge and the knowledge he had found his soulmate in a high school student of his god forsaken hometown.

~*~

Stiles had to admit Peter seemed to do a lot better.

He was widely hated or at the very least shunned by most of the pack - Erica and Boyd being the most neutral of the bunch and Derek and Stiles being the only two occasionally acting with anything resembling sympathy towards him. And yet Peter did little more than snark unless someone attacked him first.

He was smart and helpful - if he felt like it - he took no shit but made an effort to be considered pack. He actually cooked for them on pack nights - introducing Boyd to the passion of preparing food.

Stiles was torn between getting closer to find out what they could have had and keeping his distance because it might hurt too much.

But it got harder and harder to ignore their connection.

~*~

Peter had accepted Stiles might never love him back.

Over the last two years he had gotten to know the boy - young man by now - and had understood more and more why they were soulmates. But Stiles had to know it, had to have found Peter’s name somewhere on his body by now, because while at first it might just have been his wolf, Peter ow loved Stiles entirely.

How could he not, Stiles was everything Peter admired in others. If it had been up to him he would have worshipped Stiles every day.

But it was okay, he understood. He had done horrible things and it was understandable Stiles would never return his feelings. He just wished Stiles would mention it to him. Yes, humans did not necessarily know when they found their soulmate, but wolves did.

Werewolf soulmates sensed each other.

And by now Stiles definitely knew that. He had read every book in Peter’s personal library, he knew almost as much about supernatural creatures as Peter himself.

~*~

It happened totally unexpected.

Stiles had been over at Peter’s for hours, researching on a new spell he wanted to try.

Peter was working - he had picked up his old job as a consultant on artefacts, their origin and depending on whether or not his client was in the know if it was dangerous or not.

He felt a strange burning sensation on his neck and cursed under his breath while his hand instinctively covered the skin there.

Stiles meanwhile made a choked noise.

Peter turned to him in confusion.

“What’s with you?” he asked, a little sullen while rubbing his neck.

The pain was gone already, probably just a bug that hat stung him.

He very much appreciated the fact his healing worked just fine. To this day he sometimes dreamed of being imprisoned in his own body, drowning in physical and emotional pain.

Instead of answering him Stiles collected his things, stuffed them in his bag and moved to leave Peter’s apartment.

Not sure how to react Peter passed Stiles with supernatural speed and blocked his way, eyes searching for a goddamn reason.

“What is suddenly going on Stiles?”

He saw Stiles’ eye flicker to his neck where he though he had been stung.

“What? What is it? Does it look bad?”

He was more confused than angry still, touching his neck again but not feeling any kind of skin irritation.

Stiles shook his head while Peter tilted his and still stared.

Eventually Stiles rubbed his own neck.

“Just...go take a look in the mirror...I’ll still be here when you come back. Promise.”

 

Peter moved to look at the mirror in the hallway and could not believe what he saw.

In Stiles’ scribbled handwriting there was a name written on the left side of his neck, just underneath his jawline.

Mieczyslaw.

He stared at it blankly for a while, comprehending what this meant.

“Is your…” he swallowed hard “It this...yours?” his voice almost died on the last word.

Stiles sighed as if he was sorry.

“Yeah…”

But how was that possible?

“Why now?” he managed to say.

Stiles just shrugged.

“It was just a really nice and soft moment, domestic and wholesome...everything I ever hoped for back when...when I felt like I had noone…”

Peter swallowed hard against the tightness of his throat.

“But...my name...why did you never…”

Stiles lowered his gaze.

“I...I didn’t think you could still love me after I- you know...I also wasn’t sure you were still mine to have…”

Peter rubbed his hand over the letters again and smiled weakly.

“We are such idiots…”

Then his eyes changed and something like a want appeared in them, his voice was still hoarse but the melancholic undertone was disappearing.

“Show me yours.”

~*~

Stiles chewed on his lower lip.

“I covered it up…”

Hesitantly he turned around and lifted his shirt to show the tattoo.

“Oh wow…” Peter mused behind him.

“Can I touch it?”

Stiles swallowed.

“Yes.”

He felt Peter’s fingertips follow the form of the wolf and the trees.

“I actually like it” he said, now definitely sounding longing, almost lusting.

“I will wear your name on my neck with pride though. If you want me to that is.”

Stiles turned around at those words and nodded.

“I would love that.”

Peter grinned delighted.

“May I kiss you, Mieczyslaw?”

Stiles snorted.

“Although I am impressed you actually pronounced it right I really hope for your sake that was the last time you called me that.”

Peter smirked and spoke teasingly “you didn’t answer.”

With his cheeks blushing even more Stiles nodded.

“Yes please.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it :)  
> This story is not beta read - not even by me so far, though I will change that at some point >___<  
> Comments make me happy!


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